Episode Transcript
It is 1572, London, England.
The weather is cold with frequent rain and promise of storms. With a stroke of her quill pen, Queen Elizabeth the first is going to launch her own storm that will sweep away the old world and replace it with something utterly radical. It is a new form of geopolitics.
This will lead this grey little island on the outskirts of Europe, a minor country yapping at the heels of major European nations, to become the greatest power on the planet with an Empire on which it boasts, 'The Sun Never Sets.'
She is issuing Letters of Marque and Reprisal to Francis Drake.
They intrinsically and legally tie war, a matter of state, and business, a matter for the individual, as partners in action.
It is an early form of state deregulation masquerading as regulation. It is a brilliant smoke and mirrors play.
In essence, she is giving Drake license to act as he sees fit in pursuit of wealth and power with state support.
Nearly four hundred and fifty years later, the full impact of her actions will become clear in framing a country that does not currently exist, but will supersede the British Empire as the world's greatest power. By doing so, it will reveal the system in all its nakedness.
It is January 21, 2010, the weather in Washington DC is cold, with occasional snow flurries, and the U.S. Supreme Court is about to hand down a ruling that will deepfreeze corporate and elite power into the country's political fabric.
This will now ensure money, openly, will be the major deciding element in who the electors vote for. This has always been true in American politics, but now all pretence that this is not the case is gone, and therefore the amount of money coming into the system will grow exponentially.
The legal ruling that grants corporations the same rights as individuals in the U.S., including the ability to make political contributions, is now known as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Its key points are stark, anomalous because it means a legal entity can be a citizen when that is palpably nonsense, and unleash a tsunami of political funding by ruling that corporations (and unions) have free speech rights under the First Amendment, just like people.
This is reinforced by the equally curious ruling that spending money to influence elections (including through independent expenditures) is a form of protected speech because that is fundamentally undemocratic as it ensures those with the most money will have the loudest voices.
It strikes down parts of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, 2002), which had banned corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds for "electioneering communications" (that is, ads explicitly supporting or opposing a candidate) close to elections.
The decision will lead to the rise of Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns, as long as they do not coordinate directly with candidates.
Thus, an already shady system is now shamelessly the best money can buy.
The U.S. Supreme Court has largely worked as an arm of elite power so its ruling should be no surprise.
But the real question is why would you reinforce this influence, so openly and widely, when the elite already have control of the major institutions of authority?
The reason is as we point out in Excluded Part 1, elite hubris.
As winners of the war against the Soviet Union, the hegemons do not want any opposition to their plans for the new world they control, even from their fellow countrymen and women.
There is another very good reason.
2008 crash was a close-run thing. A president elected on the slogan 'Change You Can Believe In,' had appeared to hesitate, before bailing the failing financial corporations out with billions of tax-payer dollars. Knowing how the business cycle they control works, they need to ensure that they will be guaranteed another bailout when needed, while ordinary American people will continue to bear the recurring brunt of their excessive greed.
Times may change, but the psychopathic mindset of the American elite remains untrammelled, and uncontrolled.
In a country where only money matters, it makes sense that it be used to ensure that even more of it can be made, by those who control the system.
The intended results, both billionaires and their elected acolytes, are laughing in the faces of the American people.
An oligarchy, whether imperial or corporate, works only for its own benefit, not that of the nation.
So, having established a singular elite and one economic framework for the whole country with the Civil War, maximising personal and corporate profit has been the main motivator of political and business action in America.
The American elite have always known that the system they created needs to be highly dysfunctional and discriminatory so they can do as they please, without organised opposition. Any semblance of this, makes it likely to fracture at any moment and spin out of their control. This obviously cannot be allowed to happen.
Consequently, they have cleverly combined a method that not only serves them in their voracious acquisition of wealth and power, but also ensures the system stays in their control by getting the general public who do not directly benefit from elite actions, to support it.
War is the means to bloodily bind America together against an everchanging enemy abroad who, in reality, is no threat to the nation, while siloing them at home on the basis of ethnicity, colour, class, language, political affiliation, today the idea of supported self- identity, the list is as long as the times it is needed.
If we count only major conflicts with sustained combat, the U.S. has been at war for roughly 225 years out of 238 years of its existence, and that is if we exclude undeclared proxy wars it is engaged in today in Ukraine, West Asia and the Sahel region in Africa.
The Vietnam War was the closest America came to the breaking of this paradigm. Through extreme police and civil guard violence, massive surveillance, control of public opinion through media and Thinktanks, the danger of ‘too much democracy’ has been defeated. Note how few major anti-war demonstrations take place in America.
The elite are in total charge today in every aspect of American life.
In a country founded on Exclusion, division is hard-wired into the system. It is also the most effective method of domestic control.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the task is made easier once those to be suppressed and those to be diverted are easily identifiable ethnicities as in America.
Then, each sees and reinforces the other’s mindset.
The now apparently emancipated black people are suppressed and their voices stolen so they cannot vent their anger at the failure of the new system to deliver on the promises made to them.
This exclusion of black people from the new system is vital to solve the acute problem of how to unite the white people of the South and North which is crucial to embed ‘one people, one system’ for the elite.
As a consequence, white people are diverted from the real reasons for sacrifices that they had made on both sides, loss of life and wealth, by the new system uniting them against those for whom the war has ostensibly been fought.
If the white people of the South were to become aware that the war was about money much of which has headed North, that the aim of the Civil War is to impose a new economic system on them, and freeing the slaves, and the impact on their lives, is just collateral damage in this process, it will be a disaster for the elite.
Not only people of the South but also many in the North would feel betrayed and that will almost certainly prevent any unity.
That, in turn, will undermine the very reason for the war.
It is politic, and highly cynical and manipulative, to let white people in the South focus their anger and hate on a visible symbol of a different colour, ‘the other,’ that is only three-fifths human as defined in the American Constitution, has always been outside the white system, now provides no economic benefit, and represents the reason for the destruction of their better world.
There is an additional benefit for the elite in the post-war fallout.
The Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1676, had seen indentured Europeans fighting side-by-side with free and enslaved Africans against Virginia’s colonial government in what was a local act.
Systemic apartheid, legally separating people, ensures it cannot happen again in the newly industrialising world, when it might not be contained locally, and when its financial, social, political and economic impact would be far greater, perhaps systemically influencing.
To emphasise the bait and switch, reality v appearance, that is legally taking place, the 14th Amendment of July 9, 1868, grants citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to free African Americans and slaves, emancipated after the American Civil War.
Yet it is followed in 1896 by the Supreme Court 7–1 decision in the Plessy v Ferguson case that gives sanction to laws designed to enforce segregation on the basis of ‘separate but equal.’
It is like telling the world, and more pertinently black people, that Jeff Bezos and George Floyd are same in the eyes of American society.
This is the same language that the apartheid regime in South Africa adopted when it established its own version of the system.
In reality, apartheid is the elite system throwing a scrap of red meat to the alienated, made-poor, Southern whites who are looking for something, anything, to give hope and shape to their lives which have been altered so quickly and violently.
In this environment, the Supreme Court ruling helps by reinforcing and reiterating the existing psychology of white privilege that has been damaged, and is the instrument of elite choice for creating white unity in their America.
It suits all the elite.
Now you have a country coming together under one system, divvied up by the political elite between them, using a divided people for their own ends, as they always have since America’s inception.
In the North, the Republicans continue with their virtue signalling for having emancipated slaves, while publicly being able to distance themselves from a ruling made by a supposedly independent Supreme Court, which is needed to reinforce the national white identity that they have been working for.
In the South, it allows the Democrats to double-down to their bitter white constituency.
Jim Crow, welcomed and supported by the Democrats as an election winning strategy in their heartland, is no longer a guest. He is given his own big, white house and a gun to keep others out by the same institution that has legally extended equal rights to African Americans only twenty-eight years before.
For African American people, it is the worst of all new worlds.
African American emancipation is largely a symbolic act and makes little or no material changes to their lives for the better.
In many cases, it makes it worse.
Abandoned, with no jobs or resources, they have to find work and also somewhere to live.
Despite the efforts of individuals like General Oliver Otis Howard who as commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (the Freedmen’s Bureau) tries to secure housing, jobs and legal protection for freed slaves, there is little access to economic security, governance, politics, and education for the vast majority.
Many end up back working for the same slave owners for exploitative wages which are not sufficient to pay for a leaky roof over their heads or cover the cost of basic daily living.
As a consequence, many also end up as indentured workers tied into working for the same employer until the debt they were accruing to survive daily is paid off.
It is a kind of medieval slavery re-imagined for the ‘newly freed’ in the Land of the Free.
It is estimated in the years immediately following ‘emancipation’ over one million African American people die through hunger, exposure, and illness.
How did corporations become so important and powerful in America?
The American elite did not do it alone or even invent the tools. They have just taken them to the extreme, because they can. In a new country without precedent, you can make it all up as you go along, if you have the power.
The seeds for corporate power were sowed in England.
America grew out of England, and its elite and America’s, had the same colonial and expansionist mindset. England had already long established the company as the instrument of choice in its endeavours.
A new country like America that was based on materialism, and an economy that naturally would grow, found the ideal tools already at hand.
The process began in Elizabethan times when the monarch authorized privateers like Sir Francis Drake to conduct raids against enemy ships and settlements with what were known as "Letters of Marque and Reprisal." These documents granted individuals the legal right to attack and seize the vessels and cargo of nations at war with England, effectively acting as state-sanctioned pirates.
A portion of the captured treasure (often a significant percentage, sometimes up to half) went to the Crown, while the rest enriched the privateer and their crew. Drake's raids, such as his famous 1577–1580 circumnavigation, brought immense wealth to England and himself.
Since England was not always officially at war with Spain, Letters of Marque allowed the monarchy to harass Spanish interests without direct state involvement.
Without such a commission, Drake’s actions would have been considered piracy, punishable by death. However, with a Letter of Marque, his exploits were legitimized as acts of war.
The dilemma for the entrepreneurial and those desperate to gain wealth and power was simple. They needed a protective legal framework that could be utilised at all times.
The led to the legal entity, ‘the company’ or now more usually called ‘corporation’ that we have today.
A company could be presented as a separate and independent entity. Thus, it could provide those working for it legal protection as long as they acted within its charter aims, and therefore, no individual could be held legally responsible for what it did. At least most of the time.
This established the template of The War of Business we see around us.
The volition for what became the British Empire is provided by private companies like the East India Company (EIC) which is founded on December 31, 1600, by royal charter from Queen Elizabeth I.
Seventy years later, when colonisation is in full swing, the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) is founded on May 2, 1670, by royal charter from King Charles II of England to control the fur trade in British North America (primarily in what is now Canada). It will go onto become one of the oldest commercial corporations in the world, all while making huge profits.
The East India Company on the other side of the world, in Asia, is making huge profits by creating the triangle of success. In India, it is basically establishing its own domain, and huge profits by a combination of trade and taxation larceny, and massive profits in the China by selling opium to Chinese people in return for gold, silks and stolen tea, which they will sell in Europe to a growing wealthy, and also establish tea plantations in India to destroy Chinese monopoly. Profits make some individuals extremely wealthy, and of course, flow into the coffers of Britain, making it ever more powerful in a virtuous circle of shared interests.
So, they operate free from any legal constraints and with tacit government support. Their sole aim, maximising profit. Their large, private armies ensure that the exploited remain exploited and willing.
Private companies are, in practice, the shock troops of the empire and lay the path for British governance by creating the conditions for this to happen.
American Corporations continue with this playbook, and have the same role today, as they have throughout its history, in China and Asia in the Nineteenth Century, Latin America in early Twentieth Century, Middle East after World War II, rest of the world today.
There are a few exceptional countries to resist this corporate America colonisation.
Russia and China are the biggest examples, and therefore designated ‘enemies’ of the West, but the Chinese and Russians know their history.
It was the imposition of American Neoliberalism in the Nineteen Nineties that destroyed the Russian economy, so that within seven years of its adoption by Boris Yeltsin in 1991, Russia was bankrupt.
This directly led to the loss of life savings of ordinary Russian people, and deaths of thousands as all their life support systems were dismantled, or collapsed under the new system.
For private enterprises to act in this unregulated way requires a supportive political elite, and a supportive legal elite, who combine to create the political and legislative environment necessary for the corporates to act as they see fit, in line with their wishes.
One of the foundational tenets for a democracy is that the judiciary is independent of the Executive.
Like all other political truisms, it does not hold up in reality.
The U.S. Supreme Court rulings throughout its history, including those on worker rights, reveal it to be an arm of the elite, and its active role in shaping the landscape to aid corporate and elite interests in economic and political terms is inarguable.
This should not be any surprise as all Supreme Court Justices are political appointments, chosen because their rulings and mindset reflect that of the sitting president and the ruling elite in the Senate.
They are not independent adjudicators of the law, neither are state or district judges, but active, elite players in the American political system.
In various cases, the Supreme Court has, in what can only be termed elite, political rulings, granted corporations some of the same constitutional rights as citizens, often denied to fellow human beings.
Explicitly, they are protected by the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Given their historic and continuing role, this all makes sense including the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC).
What it means in practice is that it institutionalises corporate power into American law, and therefore, in American society because a corporation, by dint of its wealth, will always be in a more powerful position than the individual.
As far back as 1919, in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that Henry Ford had to prioritize shareholder profits over broader social good.
As a result of this framework, and the mindset it represents, virtually all aspects of American life have been corporatized today, and turned into profit centres with callous disregard for the common civic good, and total regard for the bottom line of the chosen few.
Education, healthcare, housing, social welfare, civic amenities, infrastructure, policing, the prison system, culture, reliable money, and even that most national of acts, war.
The process is foundational in setting, ongoing in implementation, with unrestrained greed as inspiration.
Imagine the corporations of today as ships sailing under Drake. Different face, same outlook. No longer legalised piracy but supported gangsterism.
Let's be honest about the world we live in.
The esteem in which gangsters and killers are held in the American psyche is because subconsciously all the American people know they live in a gangster state, and those defined by the state as gangsters represent those outside the elite, the ordinary people, getting a piece of the action.
Appropriately perhaps, no organisation summed America up better than the Mafia in their adage, “It’s all about the dollar. At the end of the day, it’s all about the dollar.”
We would add one other thing. 'It's only ever about the dollar."
